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Sporty Takes Over Traditional Men’s Wear

FLORENCE — The crowd of excited, energized young men around a giant screen in a key position at the Pitti Uomo fair told the whole story. The World Cup was on TV, and sports had taken over a pavilion once dedicated to formal suits, shirts and neckties.

The first stand to hit you in the eyes at the entrance displayed Brooks Brothers’s vivid polo shirts and feisty gingham checks against a poster of the Hamptons. The famous American brand’s switch from formal to easy and discreet to vivid was symbolic of the entire section.

Colorful, casual and cash-driven were the three “high Cs” of the menswear summer 2011 season. Or make that “high seas,” for marine influences were abundant, from striped seersucker pants competing with denim to the blazer as the No. 1 jacket.

While Pitti has always had areas of its vast trade fair dedicated to casual clothes and street wear, this invasion of Italy’s heartland of tailoring is symbolic both of the struggles of the last difficult year of faltering sales and the collapse of the U.S. market, and of the new feeling that fresh energy is emerging.

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A style by Brunello Cuccinelli

A fine example of Italian smarts was found at Brunello Cucinelli, where its creator hit exactly the right note by mixing body-conscious tailored jackets and casual pants. Both were given the washed-out effect that expresses the spirit of a moment when sharp dressing still needs to have a certain softness.

“Men are changing — suits are coming back for 30-year-olds, but not like 25 years ago,” said Mr. Cucinelli, whose palette of colors brought a hazy finish to everything from a double-breasted jacket to a floating scarf. Committed to lightness and to fabric research with companies like Loro Piana and Ermenegildo Zegna, this brand sets the standard for a seamless meld of formal/casual that looks both easy and modern.

Jeremy Hackett also is wedded to the idea of “soft tailoring,” making summer jackets the stars of his collection. Unlined, and in fabrics like cotton pique, fine seersucker or even knit, the jacket becomes the lynchpin. The customer then chooses its partner: a vivid, geometric-patterned shirt, or pants with subtle details like fine stripes used diagonally for the pant cuffs. His collaborations with Aston Martin, polo and rowing clubs bring in the sports element.

In Italy, fabric performance is a corollary to an active life. Agnona styles itself as “the architect of fabrics,” and this is where high tech and high style meld perfectly. The customer may not grasp much more than that a jacket is water repellent (or “breathable” as the experts say). But the research that goes into the microsuede synthetics, into jackets padded with 50 percent re-cycled fabrics or into finding the Supima cotton-linen in South America make the Agnona line stand out.

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Fabio Quaranta’s FQR brand won the “Who Is On Next?” award at Pitti Uomo.Credit
Giovanni Giannoni

The casualization of clothing goes from head to toe — not least in a display of Church’s shoes that looked more like battered gardening brogues than boardroom footwear, or the Fratelli Rossetti ultralight rubber-soled shoes and dip-dye color effects that echoed the cloth treatments.

The blazer is the halfway house between dressing up and down. But it has become malleable, with Cerruti offering a version in jersey and Ballantyne tailoring its knits into a double-breasted cardigan.

Is the suit fading in importance along with its washed-out colors? Kiton does not think so. The Naples brand at the heart of the Classico Italia group has seen a sales increase of 40 percent in New York. Even accounting for stagnant sales in 2009, the mood is now buoyant, with a younger generation moving from “jeans and nylon” to tailored cloth — not least because Kiton has cut €1,100, or $1,360, off the price of suits aimed at the younger market.

Significantly, “Who Is on Next?”, a contest to find talent among emerging brands, picked as the clothing winner Fabio Quaranta, whose Roman label FQR is focused on linear tailoring with fabric treatments. And one of the finalists, the Japanese designer Yuji Miura, took the stitching out of formal shoes.

But the most intriguing entry was from another finalist, the 24-year-old designer behind Dead Meat, a creator of T-shirts and other clothing with radical messages. Calling his generation “Berlusconi’s children,” Giovanni Battista De Pol took elements of Italian art heritage and mixed them with intellectual cultural thoughts about William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain. His work suggests that there is a stirring among Italian youth, who may find a male fashion life beyond sport and smart.